Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan has twisted the knife just a bit more in an attempt to draw out President Obama on the Chicago Teachers Union strike, now entering its second day. He told a fundraiser in Portland, OR yesterday that he endorsed the position in the strike of the former chief of staff of Barack Obama:

“If you turned on the TV this morning or sometime today, you probably saw something about the Chicago teacher’s union strike,” Ryan said at fundraiser at the Governor Hotel here. “I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.” [...]

“We stand with the children and we stand with the families and the parents of Chicago because education reform, that’s a bipartisan issue,” Ryan continued. “This does not have to divide the two parties. And so, we were going to ask, where does President Obama stand? Does he stand with his former Chief of Staff Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with the children and the parents, or does he stand with the union? On issues like this, we need to speak out and be really clear.”

For a team that has been bumbling for weeks, the Republican ticket is finally practicing some good politics. They are trying to change the subject from the convention bounce, the lack of honesty and the other issues that have dogged them by attempting to bait Obama into commenting about the strike. And as I said when Mitt Romney first attempted this tactic yesterday, Obama should come out and say where he stands.

I think the most important by-product of this strike is that it will show how deeply embedded the Students First/Waiting for Superman frame has become, in the traditional media, in the cultural firmament among elites, and in the Democratic Party. I’ve heard people on social media wondering what this strike is about. Narrowly speaking, Chicago teachers aren’t supposed to be able to strike over anything but pay and benefits. And certainly, they’re trying to retain their health care. But it’s not that hard to see what this is about. Significant sections of the Chicago Public Schools system are starved for funds. They are putting 40-50 students in classrooms without air conditioning. The kids don’t have books or materials weeks into the term. And ultimately, the goal is to make those schools so poorly maintained, staffed and administered that they “fail,” allowing Rahm Emanuel and his hedge fund buddies to essentially privatize them:

What we’re seeing in Chicago is the fallout from Jonah Edelman’s hedge fund backed campaign to elect Illinois state legislators who supported an anti-collective bargaining, testing based education proposal giving Edelman the “clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down [the teachers unions'] throats,” political capability he used as leverage to jam an only slightly less awful proposal down their throats. It’s a political deal that explicitly targeted Chicago teachers, while trying to make it impossible that they would strike by requiring a 75 percent vote of all teachers, not just those voting, for a strike to be legal. But more than 90 percent of Chicago teachers voted to strike.

It’s not just Jonah Edelman, though. Rahm Emanuel worked with a tea party group to promote Chicago charter schools and denigrate traditional public school teachers and their unions. Emanuel’s political allies have been caught paying protesters to show up at hearings on school closures. Every story you read about the greedy teachers (greedy? does that description fit the teachers you know?) has years of big money anti-teacher campaigning behind it, pushing us to believe that teachers, who bring work home every night and routinely spend their own money on school supplies and even food for their students, are overpaid, selfish, lazy. Now, all those narratives that the right wing has built up—anti-union narratives coming together with pro-privatization narratives—are being used against Chicago’s teachers.

Privatizing the services of public schools, or the entire schools themselves, has become big business. If it takes a standardized test to force that into being, if that becomes the data that “proves” the need for privatization, that’s what will get used.

It will be important for the teachers not to get distracted by the forces arrayed against them. This liar floated that they asked for a 35% raise, a complete fabrication made doubly disingenuous by the fact that the management figure of 16% is off by almost a factor of 2.

So far, the public, which gathered in excess of 50,000 by some accounts last night at a CTU rally, is supporting the teachers, and not buying the narrative swallowed whole by the elites. We’ll have to see if that continues.

Black Agenda Report, June 2010
. . . That lesson has finally been learned in Chicago, hometown of Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Chicago’s teachers, students and neighborhoods were the guinea pigs for Arne Duncan’s campaign to hand over public education to corporations, when Duncan was CEO of the city’s schools. Mass firings were the order of the day, decimating the ranks of Black teachers, especially. Whole communities were destabilized.

“Barack Obama, the Black Democrat, who has taken the corporate education agenda farther than Bush could ever dream of.”

Last week, reformers finally won control of the Chicago Teachers Union, in what will hopefully set an example for teachers, nationwide. Karen Lewis, co-chair of the victorious Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, told the truth that so many teachers’ union hacks have been avoiding: “This so-called school reform is not an education plan,” she said. “It’s a business plan.” Lewis continued:
“Fifteen years ago, this city purposely began starving our lowest-income neighborhood schools of greatly needed resources and personnel. Class sizes rose, schools were closed. Then standardized tests, which in this town alone is a $60 million business, measured that slow death by starvation. These tests labeled our students, families and educators failures, because standardized tests reveal more about a student’s zip code than it does about academic growth,” said the union reformer.

standardized tests reveal more about a student’s zip code than it does about academic growth

That’s been known for fifty years.

NYTimes, April 2011
By JOE NOCERA
Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.

Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

In March of 2010, the Obama Administration sent Congress a “Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act” which included language on school choice with emphasis on charter schools (which it erroneously calls public schools).

Public School ChoiceSupporting Effective Charter Schools. The reauthorization proposal will provide competitive grants to states, charter school authorizers, charter management organizations, districts, and nonprofit organizations to start or expand high-performing public charter schools and other high-performing autonomous public schools, with a priority for applicants proposing to start or expand high-performing public charter schools.

Promoting Public School Choice. The proposed reauthorization will continue to provide competitive grants to districts, consortia of districts, and states in partnership with districts to expand high-quality public school educational options for students, especially for students in low-performing schools, and to ensure that students and families are aware of these options.
Continuing the Magnet Schools Assistance Program. The proposed reauthorization will continue to provide competitive grants to districts to support magnet schools under a desegregation plan ordered by a federal court, state court, or other authorized state agency or official, or approved by the secretary.

Emanuel, who grew up in Wilmette, sends his three children to the University of Chicago Lab Schools. He’s previously said that his decision to send his children to private school does not mean he can’t identify with the parents of CPS students.

Obama will pressure teachers to return to work and side with his union-busting Clintonite pal, Rahm. He has no choice. Stein is now registering in national polls; the base is running away. Triangulation is his only hope and there is nothing that would endear him to Republican voters more than privatizing education in the birthplace of the union movement.

Ryan could not drive the wedge home unless Rahm and Obama had teed it up.

I was originally going to vote third party because I’ve given up any hope of reforming the Democrats, and I don’t enable mendacity.

Then Romney chose the zombie-eyed granny starver, who scares the living crap out of me – I was raised amongst fundamentalists, and they are impervious to reason. So I figured, hold my nose, and try to stave off the day of reckoning Republicans will surely bring. With Democrats, Armagedddon gets here a bit later.

But crap like this makes me think, screw it, bring on the day of reckoning.

yes. and the goal isn’t straight up profits for the investors in privatized schools; wall street knows that doesn’t work. Rather, the goal is to create a rigidly stratified education system. The 1%ers send their kids to truly elite private schools. the top 10% either send their kids to quality (still public schools) in affluent suburbs or to selective enrollment exclusive schools in urban districts. The next 20-30% get minimally adequate charter, contract or choice schools. And that leave the bottom 60% to go to bare bones underfunded, under staffed, non unionized schools that are part of the cradle to prison pipeline. In short the point is not profits in education, but to eviscerate the public sector for both purely ideological reasons and for fiscal reasons. Rich people shouldn’t have to pay taxes…….

Both Republicans and Democrats want to turn public services and public assets into institutions that exist, as the “free” market Galtians like to tell us, solely to maximize shareholder profit.

Both Republicans and Democrats expect to use the tax dollars of working people to fund these institutions and bail them out when they fail, while eliminating taxes on corporate and shareholder proftis.

Lots of collaboration going on here. None of it to benefit students, teachers, or anyone else in the 99%.

Good points, but Nocera also said: “Reformers have long complained that teachers’ unions too often use poverty as an excuse for poor performance. Lewis’s remarks would seem to justify that complaint….”/strong>
Here he is obliquely supporting the stupidity that poverty doesn’t determine ed outcomes. But we know that the results of standardized testing predict the zip code of residence better than ed outcomes. The exceptions, carefully understood and analyzed, support the rule.

There’s a new major article on the increase in poverty and homelessness, especially among families with children, almost every week. Anyone notice Barry’s focus on the poor and his daring new great society initiatives at the Dem convention? Nope.

Nocera ends: “Students in other countries now regularly outperform American students. We are truly in the midst of an education crisis — one that won’t be solved until we completely rethink the way we offer public education.” He doesn’t mention that observers from other countries are shocked by the visible poverty and homelessness in our cities.

Nocera’s last sentence seems to support the reformers against the teachers. Another example of “he said…she said…both sides are wrong and both sides are right.” Expected from the NYT, but sad from Nocera.

There are many ways to look at the teachers strike. One is to notice that Rahm’s initiatives are designed to empower a takeover of public education by for-profit corporations. The same ones that contributed mightily to his election.

While everyone is (appropriately)focused on the decline of the middle-class, and the coming of the Grand Sellout, scumbags like Rahm and Ryan are also developing exciting new ways to extract wealth from the poor. Turn the prisons over for profit, turn schools over for profit, block-grant Medicaid and privatize its administration, freeze TANF funding to the states so there’s no counter-cyclic impact in a downturn. Then just stand back and watch the political contributions roll in.

Perfectly put. Ryan and his GOP cohorts hate public educdation and teachers’ unions, but they’re honest about it. Obama and Rahm essentially want to do what Ryan wants, except Ryan is more forthcoming.

I don’t like Ryan or Romney, but he’s very smart here politically. I’d bring this up too if I were him.

I have no sympathy for Rahm or Obama here. This is their own fault. I can imagine Obama squimring right now. Wisconsin 2.0.

“The CTU strike fund is HARDLY in need of money. It’s been 25 years since they went on strike.”

And the Education Deformers are funded by (literally) billionaires. CTU is using the money not only for strike supplies but to communicate its message in a very hostile mainstream media environment.

“I love it that the Republicans think they’re going to drive a wedge between Rahm and the teachers. Won’t happen.”

You have no idea what you are talking about. Rahm drove the wedge between himself and the teachers from the beginning. Go read mainstream press in Chicago over past 2 years. Then formulate a fact based opinion.

Stay strong. The Republicans and the Democrats work hand in hand. Ryan’s objectives will be pursued regardless which party takes office.

The entire point of all this shit is to fear-drive you into the arms of *either* major party … thereby ensuring that one of the two can claim a “mandate” to do what they’ve both agreed in advance will happen. Don’t be a sucker. We may not be able to stop them, but the least we can do is register some measure of opposition to it rather than play the reactionary cog in their fuck-everyone-over machine.